Martin B. Leon, MD, is the Mallah Family Professor of Cardiology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center College of Physicians and Surgeons and director of the Columbia Center for Interventional Care (CICC) at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. Previously, Dr. Leon was the director of the cardiac catheterization laboratories at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, and currently, he also serves on the executive board of the New York-Presbyterian/Columbia Heart Valve Center.  Dr. Leon was the founder of the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) symposium and chairman emeritus of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF) in New York City.  TCT is the largest dedicated interventional cardiology meeting in the world, and CRF is the largest independent not-for-profit cardiovascular research and education center in the world.  Most recently, Dr. Leon has transitioned to a position as chief innovation officer and director of data science for the cardiology division at Columbia/NY Presbyterian Hospital.  

A distinguished pioneer in interventional cardiovascular medicine, Dr. Leon has been the national principal investigator for over 75 clinical trials that have helped shape the field, including STRESS, STARS, Gamma-one, SIRIUS, ENDEAVOR, RESOLUTE, and, most recently, the PARTNER trials, studying the value of transcatheter valve therapy for patients with aortic stenosis.  He has co-authored more than 2,500 peer-reviewed scientific publications and abstracts, which have appeared in the most prestigious medical journals. Dr. Leon has performed over 10,000 procedures during his career.  

He founded and has been the director of Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT), the world’s premier scientific symposium dedicated to interventional cardiovascular medicine, which is celebrating its 36th anniversary this year and attracts over 10,000 attendees from 100+ countries. He has also been the director or co-director of more than 100 international educational programs in the field. Dr. Leon has received more than 25 international career achievement awards, including the prestigious ACC Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019. He has been awarded honorary degrees from the University of Athens and the University of Ioannina in Greece.  In May 2020, Dr. Leon helped co-found and has been the co-chairman of the newly formed Heart Valve Collaboratory, a multi-disciplinary think tank endorsed by the FDA and designed to address evidence gaps in the field of valvular heart disease.   

Dr. Leon was previously a founder and director of clinical research at the Washington Cardiology Center at Washington Hospital Center and clinical professor of medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, DC. He also served as a clinical associate, senior investigator, and director of the catheterization laboratories in the cardiology branch of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Dr. Leon received his medical degree from the Yale School of Medicine and completed his internal medicine internship and residency, as well as a cardiology fellowship at the Yale-New Haven Hospital.